Zelensky Rejects Peace Talks as Counteroffensive Falters
The Trends Journal has called for peace negotiations since the war broke out because Ukraine cannot defeat Russia and will not be allowed into NATO
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Friday that his country is not ready to negotiate for a peaceful resolution with Russia—and said peace is not an option until Moscow withdraws all its troops.
Zelensky met with a delegation of African leaders at a global peace summit in Kyiv and told reporters that he told them several times that negotiations with Russian forces are pointless.
“Any negotiations with Russia now that the occupier is on our land is to freeze the war, to freeze pain and suffering,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky joined South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at a press conference after the meeting.
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The delegation met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Saturday and Putin presented what he identified as the draft documents that he said were being discussed in Türkiye just weeks after the war began, RT reported.
The document was titled “The Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” The report said the paper was signed by the Ukrainian delegation.
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The Russian president said there was momentum at the time to achieve peace, and Russia—in good faith—withdrew forces from around Kyiv. He claimed it was after that moment Kyiv authorities “tossed [their commitments] into the dustbin of history.”
“Where are the guarantees that they will not walk away from agreements in the future?” Putin said, according to RT. “However, even under such circumstances, we have never refused to conduct negotiations.”
TRENDPOST: Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, and Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings, penned an article in Foreign Affairs in August 2022 that mentions a possible peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the war.
The two, who are deeply tied to the political establishment in Washington, cited “multiple former senior U.S. officials” who said it seemed Kyiv and Moscow “have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
They said Russia changed its position on the matter in July, and the new objective is not a settlement, but rather “Ukrainian capitulation.”
Responsible Statecraft wrote about the “impact” of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Ukraine at about the time the peace deal was being floated.
Ukrainska Pravda, a pro-Western newspaper, reported that the peace talks came to a halt after Johnson’s visit. The article stated that “the Russian side…was actually ready for the Zelensky-Putin meeting.”
The report said Johnson arrived in Ukraine “almost without warning” and had two messages.
1: Putin is a war criminal and should be pressured, not negotiated with.
2: Even if Kyiv is ready to sign some agreements, the West has not crossed that bridge.
Since then, the West has only talked about more war and more weapons for Kyiv. Secretary of State Llyod Austin seemed to give a glimpse into Washington’s goals when, in April, he said, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Zelensky’s position has been that Russia must withdraw troops from Ukraine, face war-crime charges, pay for the destruction, and fork over Crimea before real peace talks can begin, which will never happen.
Neutrality is no longer an option and Ukraine continues its suicidal drive for NATO membership.
wonder why the Russians have not taken him out. Maybe because this whole ukrainian scenario is just a distacting play around an even more evil concept called globalism. Remember, Russia played the covid fraud on its people too.